


The Dead Limb

by ThisNothingInTheMiddle



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Gen, a spooky story for hallowe'en, first person - the Doctor's POV, gothic horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-31
Updated: 2020-10-31
Packaged: 2021-03-09 03:07:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,791
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27297649
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThisNothingInTheMiddle/pseuds/ThisNothingInTheMiddle
Summary: The Doctor is alone with his TARDIS - or at least he thought he was. But there's something else in here. Something unknown, something beckoning to him. Something that's a very long way down.
Comments: 8
Kudos: 3





	1. Down...

**Author's Note:**

> This is longer than the one-shots I usually post, but I really wanted to play with some TARDIS-based ideas and try writing some old-fashioned gothic horror. So put on some creepy music and enjoy...

I had set the TARDIS to rest, drifting through the depths of space, when something called to me.

I admit that at first I thought I had imagined it, as I was just concluding a long month of busy nights at the university, and even though I’m not a tortoise – or a human – I could feel the allure of sleep. But there was something other than Morpheus beckoning to me. I wondered if the scanners were wrong, if there was something outside the TARDIS – but no. We were in the deepest of deep space, where no solid matter had ever come within half a billion light years, and possibly never would. The call came again, and I knew that whatever it was, it was coming from inside the TARDIS herself.

The thing trying to attract my attention wasn’t exactly a sound. It could best be described as telepathic, but it was barely even a thought. Its brush against the edges of my perception was incredibly light, like a strand of softest silk drawn across skin. I suppose it’s possible that it had been calling for a long time, and I’d only just noticed because of my own exhausted state; if I had been more alert, perhaps my mental guards would’ve blocked it out completely. As it was, trying to concentrate my mind on the call was like grasping at smoke. In fact it may not have even been a call at all; it was so insubstantial that I could detect no meaning in it.

Concerned that something could be amiss inside my oldest friend and trusted ship, I knew that I had to investigate. Given that I had no idea how time-sensitive the issue was, metaphorically speaking, I left the console room without further delay. I knew that with my not inconsiderable experience with – well, with practically everything, but especially with the unknown and the unusual – I required nothing more than what I had on me to deal with the situation. Although, given how things progressed, I now wonder if I should not have reached for at least a sonic screwdriver or two.

I followed the direction in which the airy nothing seemed to originate. I often had to pause to concentrate – or perhaps to do the opposite of concentrate, and let it nip at me when it felt ready.

The topography of the TARDIS has a unique flare that the majority of its tenants have never been able to fully understand. She still has the capacity to turn _me_ around, and I suspect that she sometimes does so just to keep an element of mystery in our relationship. Recently, while both living on Earth, I had spent much time pacing the corridors of the ship, getting to know her spatial ebbs and flows. I recognised the paths through the living quarters and libraries, the laboratories and landscapes. I got the impression that the TARDIS’ geometry was particularly subdued at that moment, as if leaving it floating in the far end of empty space had rendered the ship – as much as the term could be used to describe a life form of the TARDIS’ sophistication – asleep. The thought occurred to me that this unknown calling thing that I was hunting might be active only when it thought that the ship could not detect it, which only heightened my concern.

I followed the trail of the signal for an hour, and then two, through opera theatres and operating theatres. It’s possible I’d have given up the search had the signal not been growing very slowly stronger. It was now certainly a call, wanting me to come to it, and at that moment I had no reason to refuse it – other than an annoying feeling of unsettlement.

My knowledge of the rooms I walked through became fainter and fainter, until I reached a door that I had absolutely no memory of. It was in a shadowy corner of an aquarium filled with species of fish long-forgotten by the universe outside. The door opened onto a staircase, descending into what looked like an old-fashioned cellar. I glanced back and saw the lidless eyes of a frowning pseudo-shark staring at me, as if asking if I really thought it wise to follow my curiosity down this particularly poorly lit rabbit hole. The shark obviously didn’t know me very well.

I continued through several cellars, more libraries, secret passageways, normal passageways, and even a cathedral that we seemed to have picked up in some European city. I had no measurement of time outside of my internal chronometry, and the hours began to pass in a blur. As I climbed down a huge metal structure that looked like abstract art mixed with scaffolding, I noticed how cold everything had become. Darker too, though there should theoretically always be a haze of light that the TARDIS emitted automatically, no matter the décor. When I had set out from the control room I might have described this venture as leading into the heart of the TARDIS, but now it very much felt like I had bypassed the heart, and was moving further and further away from it. Even if the TARDIS now – for lack of a better word – awoke, I doubted that she would be able to sense me without a thorough search.

As I made my way through a silent dining hall that had probably never been used, passing the empty chairs and tables, the absence of other people gnawed at me. It would be awkward if the last person to ever see me was a grumpy shark. Not that I was planning to die, you understand, but an irrational sense of doom was creeping up on me. As a student on Gallifrey, you heard stories about Time Lords who got lost in TARDISes. Sometimes there was a fault in the dimensional shuffling, and they were trapped in an endless series of rooms with no way out. Sometimes a fairy from the vortex had snuck aboard and spirited them away. And sometimes the TARDIS itself had eaten them up, although I didn’t think _I_ was in any danger of that. Not unless my old girl got particularly peckish for a midnight snack.

Eventually, at the end of a labyrinth of service corridors that I only could have navigated with the help of the call now gently tugging at my mind, ignoring the passing worry of how I would retrace my steps and find my way back, I hit a locked door. It was metal, thick and solid, and gave no satisfaction to either force or cajoling. A bulky monitor sat in the wall next to it, but only wobbled dangerously when I attempted to use it. The whole set-up was obviously meant to stop people getting past as much as it possibly could while still being technically classified as a ‘door’. It was very much the kind of barrier that made me insatiably curious as to what was on the other side, and how I could go about passing it to find out.

With no other option immediately obvious, I pulled at the unstable monitor, wrenching it from the wall and placing it on the floor. I peered into the newly exposed hole to see if anything could be done to help either the screen or the door, but to my surprise was met with an alternative solution; a large gash had been ripped into the other side of the wall. Slowly, I climbed under the wires, edged through the tear in the wall, and barely stopped myself plummeting into the seemingly bottomless pit on the other side.

The room – if something so massive could be called a room – was circular, and the length and width of several theatres, or a few stadiums, or maybe a really big airport terminal. It was a little hard to tell and I didn’t exactly have a tape measure. Scattered throughout it were large columns, each approximately the width of the TARDIS’ console room (which seemed now so very far away). Faint light dripped lazily from the ceiling, leaving an awful lot of long shadows.

But the most notable feature of the room was that it seemed to be missing its floor, which if you think about it might be the most integral part of any room. As I got carefully to my feet, I stared down, down, down past any reasonable floor level, down past the depth of a rocket silo, down past the depth of a skyscraper, down while the massive pillars continued the whole way, down into darkness, down until the lines that were the pillars met at a vanishing point. I squinted into the dark, but I couldn’t even make out a floor-shaped silhouette. Technically, I supposed, there need not _be_ a floor, if the TARDIS’ interior dimensioneering was up to the test.

I was standing on a ledge, the likes of which were all around the side of the chamber and the pillars for as far as I could see, peppered with narrow staircases and even the occasional bridge between them. Every surface looked concerningly like old, weak stone. A sense of decay hung in the air, and there was chunks missing from places where the stone had presumably just crumbled away. Either this room was very, very old, or it had been tricked into thinking it was very, very old. I looked behind me, and found that the gash in the wall that I had climbed through had not been torn apart by some huge creature, but had been the work of simple rust on one of the only metal surfaces in the room.

Above me the ceiling was, while still a fair distance away, still within clear sight. I could make out green clumps of vegetation. Vines slowly spiralled around the pillars and hung down from the roof into empty space. I wondered what it would feel like to be a leaf that fell free. How long would it take to drift down, down, down to the bottom of the pit? Would it rot away to nothing before it came to rest? I knew from fatally personal experience what it felt like to fall long past the point of no return. I shuffled a little further back from the edge. It seemed an astounding oversight that there were no safety railings in the entire complex.

Near to me was one of the rare bridges that would take me out to a pillar, and to a clear path downward. I admit, though, that I was frightened. I felt the danger of falling every millisecond I spent in the room. The journey downwards was obviously treacherous, but also a very long one- if I undertook it, I may not have enough energy to return.

But… still the call came. And it came from down there.

I felt it stronger than ever here, emanating up from whatever it was that lay in the depths. I could even discern a little of its character now – and it did nothing to reassure me. It did not feel like a living creature, but I did not think it was anything artificial. I wouldn’t describe it as evil or antagonistic, but neither did it seem at all good-intentioned or kind. I do not always follow my curiosity to the bitter end, despite any reputation I may have acquired. But in this instance I felt an obligation to my TARDIS, my closest friend; I would not under any circumstances allow the possibility of her coming to serious harm. I took my first step onto the bridge.


	2. ...Down...

It was a long, monotonous journey.  
I used staircases, ladders, ramps.  
Again, hours crept by in blurred clumps.  
The ledges and stairs were sometimes  
as thin as I feared they might be, but  
there was the occasional handhold to  
aid me, even though I was weary of it  
crumbling.  
Once or twice I came to a spot where  
there was no remotely safe way to continue  
downward, and so I was forced to backtrack  
and find a new route. I took at least one bridge over to another column, making a  
noble effort not to look down as I did  
so. Every so often there was a gap  
where the path  
stopped, and began  
again a metre or two on, and  
I had to jump across. In the split-  
second that I was in the air,  
watching where my feet would  
land, I could see the endless  
pit, stretched out below me.

Eventually, the path ended in a lift.

I’d just begun to consider laying down for a rest and hoping that I didn’t drift off and roll over in my sleep, so in some ways it was a welcome sight. But it was an old-fashioned lift, with a cage-like door, and the mechanism it was attached to seemed slightly worse for ware. There wasn’t too much rust, like the wall I had used to enter this awful place, but the setup didn’t exactly inspire optimism. Furthermore, it had no liftshaft – it was simply a box hooked up to a winch and suspended, swaying slightly, a foot away from the pillar wall. When I dared to look down I could see no destination for it, so it must have been attached to an awful lot of cable, but it was all stored inside the pillar so I couldn’t be sure.

I could see no better option or alternate path, so I stepped in, closed the grate, and pressed the single black button on the far side.

The winch crunched into action with the most appalling scraping and whining noises. I worked hard not to worry about it, and waited patiently as the lift descended. It was steady for the most part, with only the occasional judder or jolt. The complaining of the winch grew quieter and quieter as it grew further and further away.

I watched the unexciting view through the cage doors as I waited, wondering if I would actually reach another floor, or if the lift would eventually come to a dead stop with nowhere to step out on to.

The wondering turned into proper doubting when the pillar beside me simply ended in a broken edge, apparently hanging from the distant ceiling like a colossal stalactite.

The lift was on its own now, hanging in the emptiness.

I sat down for a bit, trying not to cause much swaying.

The lift was, very gradually, getting faster in its descent.

The constant drab greys of my surroundings were beginning to feel slightly overwhelming.

Had there never been other colours in this place, or had part of the visual colour spectrum crumbled away into the pit like the decaying stone?

My body still wanted to sleep, but I fought against it. There wasn’t quite enough room to lie down, and even if there was I feared what circumstance in this hellish hole might cause me to awaken, or on the other hand, cause me not to.

The light was now very scarce indeed. The natural glow of the TARDIS walls was just a memory. The only illumination came from far far above, with the ceiling and the vegetation, and it was visible only when I craned my neck to look upward.

The lift was _ever_ -so-slightly _too_ fast now.

I found a pack of cards in my pocket, and sat back down to play some solitaire, although I struggled to see the card faces.

Only when I turned over a card with the face of a crumbling tower did I realise that they were tarot cards, and so put them away.

I considered possible escape routes from the lift, which were really rather thin on the metaphorical ground, and lamented my lack of sonic screwdriver.

It occurred to me that I hadn’t said anything aloud for quite some time, at least since entering the pit. Before, although I did not care to recall and record every bit of it, I talked to myself quite regularly, which I find to be an easy way to get an expert opinion. But loathe as I am to admit it, even _my_ expertise has its limits.

My sense of internal chronometry was worse than ever, and I didn’t know if I had been in the lift for less than an hour or more than two.

The lift wasn’t accelerating anymore, but was still moving at a terrific rate.

At least, it _felt_ like it was moving at a terrific rate. There was nothing visible left outside of the lift to judge the speed by.

Only the dark and the swaying.

I wondered if I jumped from the lift whether there was any chance of survival. In any room of the ship proper, I think the TARDIS would catch me, but I knew she could not help me here.

I realised that part of my now intense uneasiness was the fact that I no longer felt the old girl absent-mindedly brushing against my thoughts. Earlier in my journey she had felt faint or distant, but now she was completely missing. My vertigo and fear in the pit had only been heightened by that loss.

The TARDIS _should_ be able to reach any place within her own interior. It was her body, her domain. To cut her out of it felt brutal, cruel.

The pit was a dead place. It had been isolated from the TARDIS somehow, through infection or entropy or some unnatural means. It was like a dead limb, sticking out into the void where no-one could see it. Unfeeling, forgotten, and degenerating. Useless to the TARDIS. Hopefully just as useless to anything else that may have found it.

The lift began to gradually slow.

I tried not to wonder anything more for the rest of the journey.

I couldn’t clear my mind completely though, not with  
the signal  
that had called me all the way down here getting louder and louder.

It was clear now. Close.

I started fumbling around in my pocket,  
feeling for something that could be of use.

The lift was barely moving.

And,

with a bump,

the lift stopped.

There was now no remnant of the light above, and I could see nothing at all. Working by touch, I pulled the grate open and winced at the noise it made. Things seem so much louder in the dark. Then I reached my hand out through the opening. It met no resistance, unsurprisingly. But my arm was not the limb I was worried about. It was my feet that I hoped would meet quite a solid resistance. I was pessimistic, however, as my smallest movement still made the lift lean and sway in a way that felt much more like a pendulum than a valid means of transportation. Still, seeing no alternative, I moved my foot so that it hung in the void… and slowly started moving it downward – only to hit solid rock almost immediately and cause me to jump. The lift had halted less than a foot above the ground. Without too much more fuss, I stepped out of the lift.

The call was quite loud in that deep place, running a winding route through my thoughts and impossible to ignore. Still no discernible words, at least not in any form of language I knew, but a feeling of – of – longing? Whatever it was, it longed for someone to come find it. With no visual input, I almost saw the signal dancing in front of my eyes, etched onto the blackness. I realised that it had been more than a call, it had been a lure. Feeding my curiosity, egging me on. I don’t like being used, and I almost stepped right back into the lift to start my long journey back. I looked up, and could see the ceiling, so far away it was barely visible, and the light it gave off faded and died a mile above me. But other than that, I didn’t move. In retrospect, I wish that I had, for once, retreated. Instead, idiot that I am, I stopped and thought it over.

I reminded myself that I did have my own reasons for seeing this through. I thought of my TARDIS, who felt so distant now that I could scarcely believe that I was still within her body. I was doing this for her. And I _had_ already gone to all the effort of getting down there. Furthermore, it wasn’t as if I had never walked into a trap before. I just preferred to do so while being able to see what was ahead of me. I finally found what I had been searching for in my pocket. With a well-practiced movement, I struck an ever-lasting match, and looked around.

I had indeed reached the bottom of that almost endless pit. Wait, that’s a stupid thing to call it – either something is endless or it isn’t, and the pit demonstrably wasn’t. There was something about it, though, that made it feel stretched out unnaturally, and if left to its own devices it may stretch out further still. Perhaps it had become deeper and less traversable even as I stood there at its base. I took a breath in an attempt to calm my anxieties, and found it difficult. The match’s small flame was flickering and weak – the air was thin down here, as if on the peaks of a mountain range. What if physics and geometry had thinned out in the same manner?

I shook my head. These were unhelpful thoughts. In uncertain circumstances like these, I needed to hold on to what I could know for certain, what I could detect with my own senses, what I could see with my own eyes.

Not that there was much to see. The room, while still vast, felt not as wide as it had all the way back at its ceiling, but it was hard to judge in the struggling match-light. Those of the colossal pillars that reached all the way to the ground were the only notable features down here. They were like the trunks of ancient, petrified trees. I moved around the nearest of them and saw that, like the ground I was walking on, its surface was cracked and decaying, even more so than at the pit’s mouth. I reached out a hand to touch the pillar. Though I was gentle, pebbles and dust broke off from it, as if it was far more fragile than it should be. I decided not to do that again, and I tried very hard not to imagine the thing collapsing and bringing down all that it held up.

There had been something I felt was missing and it struck me now – life. I hadn’t seen any form of it for hours except the rotting vines miles above me, but even in a place as desiccated as this I expected some weeds, some plants and insects creeping through the cracks, some ivy growing up the walls. But no, there was nothing. I did recognise that it was probably my bias towards Earth culture, where life could flourish in the oldest of ruins, which made me expect such things. Even so, I couldn’t help but get the feeling that life wasn’t _supposed_ to exist here. Which still left the question of what was down here sending me a message.

I walked slowly around the pillars. They were like the foundations of a colossal and ancient building – or the foundations of the physical world itself. I thought of the human myth of Atlas, and wondered if it had any place in reality, or in the depths of my old ship.

Soon the wall of the pit grew out of the gloom. In the wall was an elaborately carved archway, and through the archway was a corridor. The call was insistent. As I followed the corridor it sloped downwards, which surprised and somewhat concerned me. The bottom of the pit had very much felt like the bottom of the cosmos. What would be under that?

Soon the corridor came to an end with an ornate double door. But it was not carved of stone like everything else; it was wooden, and showed no sign of rot. The doorknob was bronze and glimmering in my matchstick’s light. The call was coming from the other side.

I put my ear to it, trying to concentrate past the incoherent babble in my head. It was like a thousand voices whispering at the top of their lungs. I couldn’t hear anything but the slow, pitiful burn of the match. At least, I didn’t think I could. I didn’t know. I rested one hand on the doorknob, found it cold to the touch. Then I twisted. Then I pushed, ever so slightly.

Instantly, the call stopped dead.


	3. The Depths

I heard quite clearly the air – what little air there was – rushing past the door and into the apparently vacuum sealed room. I peeked through the gap I was holding open but could still see no light, feel no heat, hear no signs of life. Was my job done? I had ended the signal, and I could turn back.

Could I leave this door half opened? We both know that I did not.

So I opened it fully. I stepped into the new room – what I felt sure was the _final_ room. I thought of speaking up, calling out a ‘ _Hello_ ’, but as I gathered my nerves for it, there came the sound of something hitting the ground. Not something large, but something that made me, in my noise-starved state, jump. Then I heard the drone of the thing rolling toward me. I felt it bump against my boot.

My flame was now nothing more than a halo around the match-head, struggling to breathe – I suspected that without my lungs’ bypass system I wouldn’t still be conscious. With such little light, I had to crouch to see the thing at my feet. It was a candle, free of any sort of candlestick. I told myself that the small amount of air I had let into the room had probably disturbed things, and caused the candle to fall over and roll to me. I reasoned that the air flow would probably cause other noises around the room as well, so I didn’t know whether to be comforted or not when I paused to listen and could hear no other sound.

I picked up the candle, and on impulse touched my match to its wick. The results were more effective than I could have guessed. Not only did the candle blaze into light, but so did a couple dozen other candles all around the room, spread all over the floor. And it was only then that I realised where I was.

I was standing in one of my TARDIS’ old console rooms. It was one I hadn’t used in four or five lifetimes – all wooden floors, iron girders, and high ceilings. I’d taken it on before I’d grown out of my gothic phase. Well, it now seemed like _my gothic phase_ had grown out of _me_. The place used to be fitted out with carpets and comfy chairs and shelves full of books, things that had made it feel homely. I had memories of time spent with friends in that spacious room, when it had been the most welcoming place in the universe. But now the furniture and was gone and the room was all gloomy emptiness. It felt abandoned, like a condemned building. And multiplying that feeling a hundredfold was the deathly silence. I sometimes forget how important the TARDIS’ humming is to me. Without it that place was like a tomb, somewhere with no windows, deep below the ground.

But there was one window, of a sort, and it was open. Above me, the room didn’t fade gently into shadow, it instead fell into complete blackness. It was the scanner; this console room had a panoramic display on the ceiling, like a planetarium. It should show you what’s outside, or what’s going to be outside, or a DVD, or _something_ worth looking at. But instead it showed a void. No, not a void – something that was blacker than that. Blacker than pitch, blacker than the darkness of the pit, blacker than anything I’d ever seen. It was a darkness that was almost alive… a darkness that you could almost, out of the corner of your eye, see _move_ …

I tore my gaze from the scanner. It was almost hypnotic, and I did not want to get lost in it. Instead I walked to the control console. I flicked a few switches and pulled a few levers almost idly, not expecting any of it to work. I wasn’t disappointed. This room was well and truly out of power. It probably wasn’t remotely near anything that could even _potentially_ supply power, being at the bottom of the pit as it was. But… in that case, how was the ceiling scanner working?

The doors knocked slightly, and I froze. I don’t mean the doors I had entered through, I meant the doors in front of me. The front doors. The doors to the outside world – except, of course, there couldn’t _be_ an outside world.

It happened again, the doors knocked like there was a breeze, or like something was leaning against them. I raced up to them, again putting my ear to the door. I even knocked. No response, and they felt as firm as ever. What even _could_ be on the other side? There wasn’t another part of the TARDIS, I felt sure about that. I had reached as deep as I could go, the edge of the ship. Was it the time vortex? Surely there’d be a bit more buffeting than a gentle knock in that case. The TARDIS’ own personal dimension? Ridiculous, the TARDIS grows its dimension around it; there’s nothing else in it, not even empty space. The space between dimensions, then? Between universes? Or maybe a rogue nothingness, like a shadow in a lightbeam?

The doors knocked a third time, and I saw them move slightly as they did. It couldn’t be something living, it just couldn’t. Unless – but no, I couldn’t let my imagination run rampant right now. I turned around, as if to look for some kind of clue, and I saw what I had missed.

There was something sitting on the control console. It was a statue. It felt like the most alive thing in the room. With the candles all spread out behind it, their flames reflected and multiplied in the glass column like stars in the night sky, the console looked like an altar, and the statue a sacrifice. Or a representation of whatever warranted a sacrifice.

I hesitated before approaching, and again before picking it up. Its surface was gnarled and pockmarked, but still supernaturally smooth. It’s funny, but I couldn’t actually tell what it was a statue _of_. It felt familiar in a strange way, like it was evading my mind’s attempts to recognise it. It was a statue of something large, I knew that.

The doors rocked again, twice this time. I went to look, but my attention was caught by a lever, one that I hadn’t yet tried. The door controls.

You probably think that at this point I should’ve left well enough alone, but I was in far too deep. With one hand gripping the statue, I reached out with the other and hit the lever.

A few things happened in quick succession. The doors failed to open. Instead, they knocked again, more fiercely than before. Maybe out of shock, or maybe because I just wasn’t paying enough attention, I dropped the statue. As it hit the floor, everything shook violently, as if it was _the room_ that had been dropped. And on the very edge of my vision, I thought I saw a much more defined shape in the blackness above me, perhaps even reaching out of it. But as I looked upward, the ceiling changed to another view – a familiar one. The pit and its pillars stretched out above me, and looked even deeper than before, with the light at its top just a pinprick now.

The room shook again, and as it did so I saw one of the pillars crack. I felt that crack in my bones. Panic shot through me. The shaking had died down but not stopped completely, and it looked like it was the same case in the pit. Dust came floating down like snow. Another fracture appeared on another pillar, this one much closer, and I heard the booming sound of it from the doors I’d entered through.

I was frozen to the spot, watching in horror. Cracks were forming everywhere, covering the walls like spiderwebs. The pillars began to warp, distort, one even twisted dangerously. The next crack was in thin air, some miles up. There was nothing on the other side. Time and space fell through it like air out an airlock.

“No!” I shouted. Frankly, I didn’t know what else I could do.

It only seemed to destabilise everything further. Cracks widened, chunks of pillar started falling. The TARDIS’ dead limb was being hacked off.

As the pit was ripped in half, I felt its history being torn to shreds. I was assaulted by phantom memories of orphaned timelines, I remembered falling, falling because there were no pillars, and there were no stairs, and there was no pit. I stumbled as I felt the memories tug at me, felt the sensation of falling, but I pushed those pasts away. There was a dreadful screaming sound as the pit began to properly tear free from the TARDIS. I saw all of the pillars were now falling, miles and miles of solid stone, the world that they were holding up collapsing right down on top of me. I ran for the doors I had entered by – but whether to firmly close them or to run through them, I hadn’t yet decided. There was certainly no way back up the pit, but what hope did a dead console room offer me? I had almost reached them when from behind me there was an almighty crash and an ungodly screeching – the sound of the front doors being smashed open, and – I whirled around and saw

Bill, standing in the doorway. “Heya.”

I was standing in the console room – the _living_ console room. _My_ console room.

I felt how Bill looked: confused and a bit concerned.

“What? Uh – sorry, what?” I said. Well, spluttered. I wasn’t at my most elegant. Look, I’d really like to see you do better in the same circumstances.

“I said _heya_.” There was sunlight streaming in around her. I don’t think I’ve ever been so glad to see anyone. “Are you okay? You look out of it.”

I felt the TARDIS brushing my mind and warming my veins.

I was safe.

“Yes. Yeah, totally okay. I just thought I – it was just a nightmare.”

“Oh, rip,” Bill said. I’m not entirely sure why, but from context I assume she meant something like _condolences_. “So Time Lords have nightmares, then?”

“Oh yes, even Time Lords have nightmares. There are some things that you can’t get rid of, no matter how hard you try.” I turned and looked at one of the monitor screens. “I thought the TARDIS was in deep space.”

Bill shrugged. “She was here when I checked.”

Maybe I’d actually been telling the truth when I said it was a dream. I regulated my breathing and heartsbeat. No point in worrying Bill. I let the TARDIS hum resonate through me, reassuring her as well.

“What’s with the candles?”

I opened my eyes, looked around me. The room was lit by candles scattered around it. Quickly, I turned on the main lights. I didn’t remember the candles being there when I had left the console room – or rather when I must’ve fallen asleep in it. Perhaps I’d used one of Madame Vastra’s damned soporific candles by mistake, and then forgotten all about them when I woke up.

“I don’t know. Maybe the TARDIS likes it.” I started snuffing them out, one by one, and Bill joined me. “I used to have a biiig old control room that the old girl would fill with candles. She’d light them each morning, or maybe each night, and replace them when they had burnt down. It was like living in a Gallifreyan cathedral.”

“Gallifreyan?”

“As in Gallifrey, my home planet.”

“Gallifreyan cathedral… Do Time Lords have cathedrals? Do Time Lords have religion?”

I should be careful with my choice of words around Bill Potts. She loves asking questions. A student of the universe after my own hearts.

“It’s complicated.”

“Right, course it is.” We snuffed out a few more candles, and then she asked “Are you religious?”

I looked at her. “It’s complicated.”

“I s’pose.”

“If you’re asking if I believe in the existence of beings powerful beyond my comprehension, then yes, of course. It’s an unfathomably deep universe, Bill, and no matter what your opinion of yourself is, there’s _always_ something out there bigger than you. If you’re asking if I believe that those beings have my best interests at hearts…” I shrugged. “That, I’m a little less convinced of.”

Next to the last candle was a book, some old gothic paperback, with something bulky being used as a bookmark. I opened it up to find my sonic screwdriver. With a quiet ‘ _Ah’_ of satisfaction, I slipped it into my pocket, and then stopped.

“Bill, could you go and find Nardole? I’ve just remembered that I sent _him_ to look for _you_ , and he’ll search for days if we don’t stop him. He’ll get himself into trouble, you know how he is.”

She looked at me skeptically. “ _He’s_ the one who gets into trouble?”

“Yeah, have you not noticed that every week he runs straight into disaster?”

“Following your lead.”

“Well I run into disaster, and he watches that and _still_ follows me, so which of us is the _real_ idiot? Go and find him, pretty please?”

‘Pretty please’ must have worked, because Bill left after one more eye-roll.

Once she had shut the door behind her, I pulled the _thing_ out of my pocket – the thing that my hand had brushed against. Gnarled and pockmarked, but supernaturally smooth. It was the statue.

I held it up in the proper light of day. I could make it out a bit better now; it was of some sort of… creature. It was still resisting my attention, my analysis. And I still felt like I should remember it, like it’s on the tip of my memory.

I put it down and massaged my temples. So, not a nightmare, then. Unless I’d picked up the statue somewhere, and it had _influenced_ my dreams? How else could it have survived the dead room at the bottom of the pit? How could _I_ have survived? _Unless_ … Unless some of the TARDIS’ fail-safes had held on to me, or were woven into the fabric of the ship’s flesh even after it had died, and–

I shook my head. This wouldn’t do. I ran a quick scan on the TARDIS, looking for any sign of the route I had taken, of the pit. None.

I could try further analysis on the statue, scans, research, but to what end? I could follow wherever this took me, but… But I realised that I didn’t want to. I must be getting old. This was a mystery. I usually liked mysteries, I’ve _always_ liked mysteries. But chasing unknown things that lurk in the night isn’t always the same thing as chasing mysteries. And as someone once told me, sometimes it’s best just to leave the night alone.

For maybe the first time since I’d begun living here, I felt that I’d rather stay firmly on planet Earth.

The statue fit snugly into a secret compartment in my university office. I left it there to either wait for me to remember it one day, or to be lost and forgotten. I do my fair share of dwelling on the past, I think it’s the past’s turn to think about its actions and get back to me when it’s ready.

So maybe it lies there still, losing its power as the world forgets it. Or maybe it sits patiently and waits for its opportunity, and I’m a fool for ignoring it. But if it’s a choice between tugging on a barbed wire thread to see what unravels, or spending some time with my friends in the morning sun, I know which one I prefer.

**Author's Note:**

> I feel like not many people will read this fic because of its length and long-winded paragraphs, but that's show biz! If you've read this far, gratitude! And apologies to anyone who tried to read the first bit of chapter 2 on mobile, I couldn't really think of anything to make that better.  
> The ending doesn't give many answers, but I thought that was the best fit for the gothic horror style I was going for. I wasn't totally happy with my attempt to merge Twelve's voice with a cliche horror narrator in the vein of Lovecraft's stories. Eight would've been a better fit, but I wanted to use his console room as a relic of the past, and also Bill.  
> I didn't go out of my way to put overtly horrifying things in the story, but I hope I managed to give someone a subtler, creeping spooky feeling with the deep dark pit.


End file.
